Why Tiny Whoops Are The Best Drones For Beginners

August 3, 2017

Flying drones is exhilarating, fun, and almost an out-of-body experience. The first time you see yourself through your drone’s eyes flying past yourself is quite a weird feeling – but soon you get used to it, and you’ll be flying like a bird and feel freedom like never before!

Flying drones is not as easy as pro pilots make it look, though you will definitely get better with practice.

When you are starting out, it may be a little difficult, and you’ll probably crash a lot, too – which is normal – but can end up being a little expensive to keep repairing a large drone.

Large drones also have very fast spinning and sharp propellers so you don’t want to hit yourself or anyone else with it by mistake.

The Tiny Whoop is a great drone for starting out because it solves all of these issues – and it can perform as tame or as aggressive as you want it to.

What you need to build a Tiny Whoop

Since you’re starting out, you can actually build a Tiny Whoop for very few components. For a complete beginner who isn’t sure how committed they are to the hobby, and doesn’t want to invest the few hundred dollars in a radio and other tools, you can pick up a ready to fly Blade Inductrix and just mod it.

The ready to fly Inductrix comes with a radio and charger, so to upgrade it, you’ll just need:

FPV Goggles

Goggles are the biggest investment, really, since a good pair of goggles can set you back $300-400. However, there are cheap goggles available for less than $100 which work nearly as well(but they’re not sleek like the expensive ones, and can’t be expanded as easily).

The Eachine VR007 goggles are great cheap goggles for beginners. Once you are confident you’re in the hobby for the long run, you can upgrade your goggles and leave the Eachines for passengers!

Upgraded motors and batteries

Because you’re adding the extra weight of an FPV camera to the Blade Inductrix to make it FPV ready, the stock motors and battery can’t provide enough power to make it fly well.

That’s why you’ll need to pick up some upgraded motors and batteries.

The variety available in motors is what makes the Tiny Whoop so great! Starting out, you can use tamer motors, and as you get better, you can just replace the motors with more aggressive ones that fly harder and faster!

Starting out, go for the “Fast” or “Race edition” motors – they’re enough to lift the camera and fly well indoors

Once you get better, upgrade to the “Special Sauce” motors – they’re fairly aggressive indoors and can even handle being flown outdoors

Batteries are also a critical upgrade – you need to be able to provide enough power to your motors!

There are lots of different batteries available, and I’ve tried quite a few of them, but the MyLipo.de 205 mAh batteries are hands down the best Tiny Whoop batteries there are and no other packs come close to them in performance.

FPV Camera

There is no “one” specific FPV camera that you must use for your Tiny Whoop – there are plenty of options and whichever you use is fine.

Do a quick search for “Tiny Whoop camera” and choose the lightest camera from the results – you want something that is between 3-4 grams in weight, not more.

Weight is critical here – the finished product should be around 24-25 grams with the battery, not any more – the higher you go from there, the more performance you’ll lose.

You may think one or two grams is nothing, but in Tiny Whoops, those one or two grams make a huge difference.

The Tiny Whoop frame

What really makes the Tiny Whoop an awesome copter for beginners(and for pros as well) is the amazing frame design.

Because the propellers have ducts around them, it’s impossible to hurt anyone or damage anything if you crash into it. Plus, the entire setup only weighs 25 grams, so you’re not going to have enough momentum to cause any damage.

The Tiny Whoop is safe to fly around pets or kids, too – since the props are guarded and there’s no risk of getting hurt.

Worst case scenario, you’ll have to untangle it out of your girlfriend’s/wife’s hair!